A famous dictum of the 19th century British politician Lord Acton, reads "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Lord Acton would have been probably intrigued by the current debate on social network governance. After the mass hysteria generated by the fake news issue, and the proposal in Germany of a new legislation on social networks, both Facebook and Google have announced that they are going to adopt fact-checking instruments.
Facebook’s tool is a notification system that warns the user if any news has been flagged as “disputed”. Google’s tool is more complex. It is based on a label, which rates claims made in the news, and in news web sites, under six categories, 1) hard to categorize; 2) false; 3) mostly false; 4) half true; 5) mostly true; 6) true. “Sites are evaluated in a process similar to page ranking: if the site ranking is high enough, the fact check element can be displayed in search results along with your page. The entire process is conducted programmatically; human intervention only occurs when user feedback is filed as violating the Google News Publisher criteria for fact checks”. Both Facebook and Google rely on external fact-check sources, which are independent organizations looking at fact checking and authentication. Fact check business is rapidly growing, the Reporters’ Lab at the Duke University, which maintains a comprehensive worldwide database, lists more than 120 international teams active in this field.
A bit improvidently, public authorities and politicians have welcomed Facebook and Google decisions. Yet, though intentions are laudable, the notion of global fact check is quite hazardous. Truth is never mere correspondence between facts and reported facts. The best lies are not made of falsehood but of a clever mix of half and missing truths. For instance, false news that relate Zika epidemics to GM mosquitos are purposely constructed by selecting and combining real events, none of them is factually false, yet the final result is substantially fictitious.
The point is that naked facts cannot exist. The notion of observer is integral to the notion of fact, facts are inherently points of view. In real life, the notion of “objective truth” is a normative ideal, to be approximated, rather than an attainable goal. When one relays a fact, one relays also one or more perspectives on it. Rigorously speaking, the standard journalistic distinction between reporting, analysis and opinion would be tenable only if all points of view were available, could be disclosed, and faithfully reported, which is usually impossible. Reporting often implies selecting information, and determining which aspects of the fact are more relevant. This is not always apparent and the myth of neutral, factual, reporting is still believed by the majority. This myth hides the evidence that most news are “fine-tuned”, or even grossly manipulated, simply by failing to provide the whole truth, omitting some (apparently minor) facts, emphasizing suggestive details, adding redundant information. For instance, when anti-vax activists provide information on relative risks related to vaccination, they are formally correct, but substantially deceptive, because most people, who confuse relative and absolute risks, are driven to overestimate the danger (admittingly, the same trick is used by medical doctors to induce patients to treat dubious conditions, and justify the extensive usage of drugs such as statins). Finally, news can be manipulated also by altering the context. Think of a news about, e.g., Ebola outbreak. This news could have very different meanings according to the context in which it is included. For instance, if this news is immediately followed by an investigative article on military biological laboratories, or by a lifestyle piece on international tourism, or by an editorial on illegal migration, its likely impact will be rather different. Contexts unavoidably suggest extra meanings; by using them astutely, one could induce deceptive conclusions, though formally respecting the truth.
Yet, the notion of global fact check is distorting also in a further, deeper, sense. If this notion gets going, Internet giants, such as Google and Facebook, will be globally bestowed with the moral authority for assessing the truth (and trustworthiness), or falsity (and untrustworthiness) of single news, news web sites, and news aggregators. Social networks will be turned into global “providers of truth”, and their power could not be balanced by any corresponding power, neither by national governments, nor by international agencies and supranational institutions. Trust in national governments and international institutions is everywhere eroded by different, concurrent, factors. Political institutions, increasingly lacking moral authority and out of touch with citizens, are more and more unable to provide credible, trustworthy, perspectives to look at global facts. Political institutions are thus gradually driven to “outsource” their moral authority.
This is foreshadowed also by the new German legislation, though the proponents are likely to be unaware of it. The “Social networks enforcement law” goes beyond obvious criminalization of hate speech and online propagation of falsity, making social media legally responsible for false contents that they host. In such a way, this law introduces implicitly the principle, fraught with consequences, that social networks should, and are entitled to, assess “fake news”. The commentary to the draft text clearly states this principle (see, Begründung - A. Allgemeiner Teil - I. Zielsetzung und Notwendigkeit der Regelungen). In other words, while the law provides social networks with newer, stricter, obligations, it also crystallizes the structural weakness of democratic institutions. No political institution of the past – endowed with strong moral leadership, trust and credibility - would have ever enacted such a legislation; standard legal provisions against libel, defamation, and propagation of falsity would have been considered sufficient to deal with online fake. If today a new law is felt necessary, it is hardly because it is required by technological advance, it is chiefly because political institutions have lost their moral authority and governance capacity, and they need to rely on external sources of truth.
Facebook and Google affirm that they will not assess contents, they will only inform about assessments carried out by independent agencies. Yet, criteria for fact checking are a minor issue in this debate. The critical issue is power. Today, social networks are more than a “Fourth Estate”, even a networked Fourth Estate. They are becoming the sole Estate, which is taking over all other Estates, the new global moral force. They advise us on where to dine, what humanitarian causes should be supported, what music we should listen to, what is in and out. They offer moral, esthetic, political, spiritual, practical guidance on everything, to everybody. The epochal question at stake is whether tech giants, which are not subject to any democratic scrutiny and transcend all jurisdictions, could be also entrusted with the power to label what is true and false. Lord Acton would have objected to this possibility.
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